North Dakota

This topography remembers more than these white pages can record.  The sandstone bone of the land was bleached by a billion wordless years, days begetting days, long hours before the hieroglyphs and human hands came to mark it.  All of this sleeping at the bottom of the inland sea, the patience, the persistence.  Every wave, every tide, the drying eyes of the sun, the wind's elegant erasure.  With aching fingers, he tries to find the sculpture within.  There are faces, the communion between dancers, the fanciful sand castles, the towers and steeples:  All of this is indifferent to me.  The land could care less for the man.  The ambivalent sky will look away from me.  The wind has forgotten my name.  Yet this landscape will stay with me.  I am a camera.  The pictures will fade.  These are only postcards, photographs from summers of rumbling thunder, hail, high water.  In this dry land, there is nothing that can catch you, nothing to stop you.  Inevitably, you will fall.  

Every year's passing is the anguish of forgetting.  Now.  In shallow sleep, I dream of such places, familiar and foreign.